Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [256]
Reed had the ear of Interior Secretary Rogers Morton, another wealthy southeasterner, and, together with Robert Cahn of the Council on Environmental Quality, slowly brought Morton around. The result was that on October 7, 1971, with contractors from across the country gathered in Idaho Falls to bid on the major construction contract for the dam, Morton suddenly gave instructions to postpone the opening for thirty days. His explanation was that he wanted to reevaluate the project one more time to see if its benefits would truly exceed its costs. Morton, of course, was already pretty well convinced that this was not the case. More likely, what he really wanted to do was gauge the reaction to something as moderately drastic as he had just done.
In the words of Nat Reed, “The shit hit the fan.” The whole Idaho Congressional delegation was up in arms, and almost every Idaho newspaper carried an indignant editorial. In a matter of hours, an obscure project no one had heard of in a remote western state had become a main topic of discussion in the Nixon White House.
For a westerner and an ex-Congressman, Nixon himself had surprisingly little interest in water projects. It wasn’t that he was a conservationist in his secret heart; he had almost no interest in nature, either. Nixon was interested almost exclusively in politics, and mainly in foreign affairs. Domestic policy bored him; public works were especially deadly. Nonetheless, Nixon was an outstanding politician, and he knew as well as Lyndon Johnson how to use the budget process to further his ends. “At the time, Nixon was about to open the gates to China,” John Erlichman recalled in 1983. “Then there was the international monetary agreement, the SALT talks, detente with the Soviets. He couldn’t get anywhere on those without Congressional support, and Congress knew that, and the Idahoans in Congress wanted that dam.” Erlichman professed to remember little of the Teton Dam episode, though rumors at the time made him the principal point man at the White House. Whoever it was, someone in the White House turned Rogers Morton around very quickly. Eleven days after he postponed the contract opening, he announced that Teton was a sound project after all. Groundbreaking was to begin within weeks.
There was only one person who could have jerked a President and an Interior Secretary around so fast, and that was retiring Idaho Senator Len Jordan. When Nat Reed went out to Idaho soon thereafter to dedicate the Birds of Prey removal lands—a new national monument along the Snake River where hawks and golden eagles live in remarkable numbers—Jordan was with him, all smiles and camaraderie, posing for photographers. “As soon as the photogs went off,” Reed remembers, “Jordan got crude and angry. He yanked me aside and said, ‘Listen, Nathaniel Reed, we’re going to building this fucking dam and you’re going to come out to dedicate it. I’ve used every chip I’ve got on Teton Dam. What do you think I’m doing here dedicating this goddamned vulture site?’ ” At least, Reed added ruefully, Jordan was honest.
Without the support of Rogers Morton or Idaho’s governor, Cecil Andrus—who, if his later record on water projects as Interior Secretary is any clue, probably thought Teton was a bad project but didn’t dare come out against it—the only hope left for the dam’s opponents was the courts. There they went up not so much against the Bureau as against Fred Taylor, the presiding judge of the federal district court for Idaho—a man with deep local roots and a sense of religion about water development. Was he going to preside over the demise of the Teton project? Evidently not. Taylor refused to allow any discussion of economics, or of safety, during the trial, using as crabbed an interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act as he could get away with without